A diatom

Specifically, Navicula variolata.  Photographed by Arturo Agostino for the Nikon Small World Photomicrography 2013 competition.

It never ceases to amaze me how complexly beautiful the microscopic world is.

Agates

Two photos from the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition for 2013.  The top image is of a polished slab of Teepee Canyon agate (credit Doug Moore, UW Stephens Point).

The second one puzzles me.  It is a thin section of a dinosaur bone preserved in clear agate (credit Ted Kinsman, Rochester Institute of Technology).  I am surprised that the geologic processes that form an agate wouldn't destroy the fine structure of bone matrix.  You learn something every day.

Inclusion in a cut gemstone

"Rutile crystals (titanium oxide) included in rock crystal (quartz) (40x). Technique: Brightfield, Fiber Optic Illumination."

From the Nikon Small World 2013 photomicrography competition.

Butterfly tongue

Photo credit to Kata Kenesei & Barbara Orsolits, from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Experimental Medicine in  Szeged, Hungary

From the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition for 2013.

Neurons terminating in muscle tissue

A marvelous image to illustrate the term "arborizing."

From the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition for 2013.  I love browsing through the galleries each year because of the seemingly endless (but not unenjoyable) hours I spent peering through a microscope during my graduate education and faculty years.

Audrey Hepburn in the kitchen and Mark Twain in the garden

Oddly, what caught my eye (after Ms. Hepburn of course) was the garbage can, which reminded me that once-upon-a-time garbage cans were lined with newspapers, not with pull-closure plastic bags.  And they used to be small, not 30 gallons in size.

The photo comes from an imgur gallery of 29 colorized famous photos, some of them quite remarkably done, including this one of Mark Twain in a garden:

The others are worth browsing.

Train traversing the Landwasser Viaduct

Designed by Alexander Acatos, it was built between 1901 and 1902 by Müller & Zeerleder for the Rhaetian Railway, which still owns and uses it today. A signature structure of the World Heritage-listed Albula Railway, it is 65 metres (213 ft) high, 136 metres (446 ft) long, and one of its ramps exits straight into the Landwasser Tunnel.

Blogged for the beauty of the image, but I'm also impressed by the labor and skill that were involved in its construction.

I suppose it's mandatory to add: "Why a no chicken?"

Photo via, and via Reddit.

"It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"

Photo of a divi tree in Aruba's Arikok National Park.  My mind immediately anthropomorphizes it to a woman with long hair.

Photo credit: Toni Stroud Salama • MCT, via the StarTribune.

Lake Bondhus, Norway

The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year for 2011 (click image for fullscreen).

Winning (and runner-up) photos dating back to 2006 are available at the link.

Images from The Getty's Open Content Program

Alexander the Great in the Air; Unknown; Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany, Europe; about 1400 – 1410 with addition in 1487; Tempera colors, gold, silver paint, and ink on parchment.

In a scene representing one of the stories from the legend of Alexander the Great most popular in the Middle Ages, the world conqueror, dressed as a European monarch might be, is pulled aloft by a pair of griffins and an angel. They hover precariously over a sea filled with an entertaining variety of fish and other creatures. The artist emphasizes the strange chair's upward movement as it carries the group out of the square framework of the miniature and takes off into the text. 

A Harvest of Death; Timothy H. O’Sullivan, American, about 1840 – 1882, Print by Alexander Gardner, American, born Scotland, 1821 – 1882; negative July 4, 1863; print 1866; Albumen silver print.

Although Gardner's caption identifies the men in the photograph as "rebels represented...without shoes," they are probably Union dead. During the Civil War, shoes were routinely removed from corpses because supplies were scarce and surviving troops needed them. 

The two images I've embedded are from a selection of about twenty assembled at Public Domain Review.

In August of this year The Getty announced the launch of their Open Content Program which sees more than 4500 images from their collection made available under an open license, meaning anyone can share the images freely and without restriction.

A wonderful resource for bloggers and the intellectually curious.

Alice Liddell (1858)

Photographed by Lewis Carroll.  See also the photo of Alice posing as a beggar-maid.  Additional discussion/insight here.

Photo via Alabaster.

Portrait

The above image comes from a gallery posted in The Telegraph.  The photographs come from what must be a remarkable book "Before They Pass Away," documenting the faces and ethnic dress of members of small tribes around the world.

This photo was captioned "Others included the Chukchi and the Nenets (both Russia), the Drokpa (India/Pakistan), the Banna and the Karo (both Ethiopia)," but doesn't specify which group this lady belongs to.

A gynandromorph of the Common Blue butterfly

I have featured gynandromorphs before.  This one is particularly nice because of the striking sexual dimorphism of the species.

Photo by Burkhard Hinnersmann, via Gerard Vlemmings' The Presurfer.

Piggyback. Or would that be "bear-back" ?

"A polar bear cub hitches a piggy-back ride on its mother as they swim through the Arctic Ocean in Svalbard, Norway"  Picture: Kevin Schafer / Barcroft USA

A Picture of the Day from the Telegraph back in 2012.

Now I'm wondering about the etymology of "piggyback."  Did it have anything to do with pigs?  No time to look it up now.  Perhaps someone knows, or can look it up and report back to the class tomorrow.

Indirectly via a little bit of this, a lttle bit of that, a little more of...

Colliding galaxies

What will become of these galaxies? Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Typically when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides... Recent predictions hold that our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years. 

Text and image from NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day.

Fixer-upper

 

You can explore the intricacies of this interesting 1936 dormered cabin in Georgetown County, South Carolina in a wallpaper-size photo at Shorpy.

Juxtaposition

"A child waits to unload drums of diesel at a jetty in the Niger Delta, where illicitly refined fuel is sold on the black market to local filling stations."  Photograph: Samuel James

"A boy is supported as he fires a machine gun."   Photograph: Pete Mulle.

Two selections from a gallery of seventeen images from the Sony World photography awards at The Guardian.

The Danxia landforms

The stunning Danxia Scenic Area in Zhangye City, northwest China's Gansu Province. Danxia, which means rosy cloud, is a special landform formed from reddish sandstone that has been eroded over time into a series of mountains surrounded by curvaceous cliffs and many unusual rock formations. Picture: CATERS

I've seen many images of the Danxia landforms over the years.  I presume that some have been subtly altered, or perhaps photographed using HDR imaging.  This particular image is one of The Telegraph's Pictures of the Day.

Children of Ethiopia's Omo tribes

Photos by Hans Silvestre, from a gallery in The Daily Mail, via Curiosités de Titam. The photos are from the book 'Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa', published by Thames and Hudson.

Sugar shack stack of sacks

How in the world did they get the walls of the stack so precisely squared-off?  I wonder if there was originally a wall there that was taken down.  Awesome, in any case.

Photo by Harold Haliday Costain (1895–1994):  Stack of Sugar Sacks, 1933, via Couleurs.